Bob Weir’s Guitar
“He looks like a homeless man,” a guy behind me blurted.
He meant Bob Weir, the guitarist, when he took the stage at a Dead and Company concert at Fenway Park I went to with my wife and son one Saturday night not long ago. True, Weir was clad in rumpled baggy pants hemmed just below the knee like the ones we used to call clamdiggers. His snowy untamed hair and beard flailed in the humid wind.
But homeless? Far from it. He commanded the attention of thousands of raucous fans.
Still, I figured that if for some reason he found himself on the street, he would keep playing guitar. The guitar is his life.
Just like the homeless man I used to see in New York City back in the 70’s. Only the act that consumed him was not playing but writing.
I was a junior copywriter in an ad agency on 59th and Madison. My route from my studio apartment to the agency took me past him morning and evening. Every time I saw him, he was writing.
He wrote hunched over in a compact pilothouse of cardboard redolent of cat and cabbage. He must have been in his early 20’s, maybe not much older than I was at the time. Beard voluminous and tangled, face brick-red from exposure, black hair askew over his forehead, he wrote at a furious pace.
I lacked the nerve to ask him what he was writing. I dared only to draw close enough to see that he wrote in Walser-scopic script, ballpoint gripped in grime-blackened fingers. Was he writing a masterpiece? Was it gibberish? In what language was he writing? Where did he get his pens and notebooks?
He spent his days scribbling in a comp book. I spent mine pecking out copy for jock itch ointment and other products the planet could not spin without.
Had writing driven him into homelessness?
But not until I stood watching Weir perform, picturing him playing guitar no matter what his situation, did I sense a kinship, tenuous — and belated — though it may be, with that homeless scribbler from long ago.
He was a fellow writer.
The realization hadn’t occurred to me then. That I might have asked him what he was writing, or asked to read it, hadn’t occurred to me, either.
If I had, he might have ignored me and kept on scribbling. He might have screamed at me. He might have screamed that he never showed anyone what he wrote, and that to keep that promise to himself, he was “ready to die,” as Jordan Neely, a homeless man who was strangled to death in New York City in 2023, is reported to have said.
“The System that Failed Jordan Neely,” an article in the New Yorker that appeared on May 22, 2023, points out that when single-room occupancy hotels vanished in the late 70’s and early 80’s, people with mental illness started appearing in greater numbers on the city’s streets and subways. Which might account for the presence of the homeless scribbler.
And today? The same article points out that in spite of new initiatives and funding, and the efforts of people from cops and docs to EMTs and social workers, the system is stressed and many homeless face a revolving door between the street, the police, and hospitals.
Circumstances change but the tune is the same, you might say. One of the most telling passages in the New Yorker piece for me comes from Nancy Young, a program director at Fountain House in Manhattan, a center for people with mental illness that is the largest community run on the clubhouse model in the world. I paraphrase her: She said we don’t feel connected to people with mental illness. That we could be them scares us.
I am not homeless. I can’t pretend to know what homelessness is like. Okay: One time in London I camped out overnight in a disused Tube tunnel with dozens of other would-be passengers waiting for a flight — this was in the Freddie Laker days — but I was too callow to be fazed.
But now, the thought of homelessness scares me. Had scribbling so consumed him that he sacrificed roof, food, family to write all day and night? What caused his slide? Had the system failed the homeless scribbler, too? Was he “ready to die” for the freedom to scribble nonstop?
As I’ve aged as a writer, I crave the tactile, which is why long ago I gravitated to writing with a pen in comp books — much like the ones the homeless scribbler used. I feel an increasing compulsion to scribble at any given moment. I must sense that the time I have to scribble now that I’m a graybeard trickles out of the hourglass at an ever accelerating rate.
Homelessness may scare me, but if I haven’t experienced it, can I really say that I feel a connection to that long-ago scribbler? I can picture myself in his place. But picturing is not being.
I’ll never know if he wrote because he was homeless, or if he was homeless because he wrote.
But I can say with total confidence that Bob Weir’s guitar playing will not become the instrument of his undoing.